Hi guys, I have a problem I am trying to solve and I really need your help. I have created my website (selling heat packs) where I have few pdf files and it has been already indexed by Google. When I search for some of the keywords, my website is on the first page of search results, what is great. What is not so great, that only pdf files are showing up on search results! Is it possible to say Google not to index these pdf files (I do not want them to appear at all). Or is it another method you recommend ? Many thanks!
You can try adding... Disallow: /*.PDF$ Code (markup): ... to your robots.txt. This does not guarantee your PDF's won't be indexed and crawled though. Google seems to like being bad and ignores the "No Trespassing" sign quite often. They claim that it happens when someone links to your disallowed files directly and they follow the link from the other site to your PDF. You could password protect a directory and put all your PDF's in it, but that can be disruptive to users. It would be a 100% effective fix for stopping the crawling/indexing, but you will have to weigh the pro and con for your specific scenario. Another alternative would be to provide them as compressed archive files (like .rar). Once again, a fix but an inconvenience (users have to download and extract, can't view in their browser on your site).
Edit your robots.txt to disallow pdf files. Not sure if this will be a good thing for you or not though since you'll lose the pdf ranking.